Most serious Perl programmers love their language and love programming in it.

2. Perl is Useful

Perl has been successfully used for a lot of diverse tasks: text processing, system administration, web programming, web automation, GUI programming, games programming, code generation, bio-informatics and genealogical research, lingual and etymological research, number crunching, and testing and quality assurance.

4. Perl can Show You the World

Perl 5 has borrowed the most important programming paradigms, and implemented them in a consistent and fun way. It is a dynamic language, that supports Object-Oriented Programming (OOP), Functional Programming (FP), Aspect-Oriented Programming, and lots of other buzzwords, while not trying to prevent you from writing quick and dirty code to get your work done.

As such, Perl is highly enlightening. If you know Perl well, you'll have no problem picking up such languages as Python, Ruby, PHP, Java, Microsoft .NET, or more obscure languages such as Scheme. In fact, Perl has proven very influential on most of these languages, to a large extent .

Perl is also a useful stepping stone for learning ANSI C and C++, and also will improve your code writing in any language.

If you understand Perl, you'll understand the world!

5. Don't re-invent the wheel! Re-use commonly used, proven code

Perl has the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN), which is a huge collection of useful (and not-so-useful) re-usable Perl modules, under open source licences. They allow you to use them as libraries to facilitate writing your code. So instead of starting to write something yourself, do a CPAN search, or ask someone for a recommendation for a good CPAN module.

Great! Now how do I start?

See our resources page for links to pages with online resources to get you up to speed with Perl, and then become better at it.